I'm not so sure to term ``body'' is as meaningful if we consider the extremes which seem
possible in COMP. After a digital substitution, a body could very well be some software
running somewhere, on any kind of substrate, with an arbitrary time-frame/ordering (as
long as 1p coherent), it could even run directly on some abstract machine which is not
part of our universe (such as some machine emulating another machine which is contained
in the UD) - the only thing that the mind would have in common is that some program is
being instantiated somewhere, somehow. In this more extreme form, I'm not sure I can see
any difference between a substrate that has the label 'physical' and some UD running in
abstract Platonia. If you can show why the 'physical' version would be required or how
can someone even tell the difference between someone living in a 'physical' world vs
someone living in a purely mathematical (Platonic) world which sees the world from
within said structure in Platonia and calls it 'physical'. It seems that 'physical' is
very much what we call the structure in which we exist, but that's indexical, and if you
claim that only one such structure exists (such as this universe), then you think COMP
is false (that is, no digital substitution exists) or that arithmetic is inconsistent
(which we cannot really know, but we can hope)?

Advertising

Physics is already extremely abstract and mathematical, so it is really not a big step to
suppose that the fundamental ontology is mathematics or computation as Bruno, Tegmark, and
others have speculated. The big step is between supposing that somethings happen and some
don't versus everything (in some sense) happens. To say there must be substrate, some
'ur-stuff', is really just to say that some things have existence (the ur-stuff) and some
don't.

Brent
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Everything List" group.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.